Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [74]
“The murderer in London is very likely mad. What he’s doing is the work of a ruined mind. The murderer I’m searching for isn’t mad. Whatever reasons he—or she—had for killing, there was a reason.”
Smedley sighed. “I can give one to you. Envy.”
“Envy?” Rutledge repeated. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice of sins. And often not a murderer’s, either, in his experience.
“Envy is at the root of many small cruelties. Watch children at play, if you don’t believe me. It’s a natural emotion in them, and they aren’t yet civilized enough to suppress it.”
A child might kill out of envy ... “What could Olivia envy?”
“Oh, I daresay many things. A whole leg rather than a shriveled one, for starters.”
“And Nicholas?”
The rector tilted his head and looked at the angel’s face. “I don’t know that Nicholas ever envied anyone. He was a decisive man, in his way. He made his choices and lived with them.”
“Then why didn’t he leave the Hall, go away to sea, make a life for himself somewhere else?”
“Nicholas had an affinity for the sea, that’s true. In another age, he’d have been one of Drake’s sea dogs or Nelson’s captains—or perhaps one of Hakluyt’s geographers. I can see him racing a tea clipper to China and back.”
All of which demanded daring and skill and personal courage. Not to mention ruthless leadership. Yet he’d let himself be led into suicide—
Rutledge shook his head. “I’m not any closer to understanding him than I was at the beginning.”
“You won’t understand Nicholas, trust me there. Have you read the poems?”
After the briefest hesitation, Rutledge said, “No. Not yet.”
“Let me give you a word of advice. As a priest.”
When Rutledge said nothing, Smedley went on. “Be sure your own ghosts don’t infringe on your logical mind—don’t rain havoc on Borcombe in search of your own absolution. If you can’t finish the puzzle that worries you, be man enough to walk away from it while the rest of us can still get on with our lives. This is a very small village, you see, and we don’t have your London sophistication. We shall go on suffering long after you’ve gone away.”
Watching Smedley walk off across the wet grass, Rutledge was prey to a variety of emotions, and Hamish, relishing the turbulence in his mind, was busy taking advantage of it.
“Ye’re no’ wanted here,” he said, “and no’ wanted in London as well. I’ve no5 seen anywhere you belong!”
“That has nothing to do with the Trevelyan family,” Rut-ledge replied coldly. “The rector is right. My work and my life are separate.”
“Ye’re no’ keeping Olivia Marlowe from getting under your skin!”
“She’s no different from any suspect! Not to me!”
“Except that she’s dead,” Hamish reminded him. “Is that why ye’re no’ reading the poems? You read them often enough before, when ye knew she was alive!”
Rutledge swore and headed for the stone walkway that led from the churchyard to the road. His reasons were his own affair, and none of Hamish’s.
It was a long and tiring day. He was summoned, twice more, to come to the moors. The first time it was a boy who came to fetch him. The ground he must surely have covered last night seemed very different in the sunlight, brown and green and black and yellow, and not very much like the higher Yorkshire moors he knew so much better. But this too was sour land, that grew grass and reeds in the low-lying damp, and vast stretches of quaking marsh that could become quicksand in the blink of an eye.
The boy cheerfully threaded his way through a maze of paths and chattered on about the war, wanting to know how many Boche Rutledge had personally (and bloodily) killed, and if he’d ever been wounded himself. They’d reached the subject of aircraft, and whether the Inspector had ever been up in one (he was disappointed when Rutledge said no), and how many flaming crashes he’d personally witnessed, when the first lines of searchers came into sight below a knoll.
It took them fifteen minutes